The gambit gone wrong

The initial affection is wearing out when your wife begins to dismiss your past achievements with “So what?” Unfortunately, the husband reads it as: one should not rest on one’s laurels. Ergo, the more the wife grows tired of the feathers in his cap, the more he tries to show what a plumy peacock he is, saying, “The boss thumbed up my presentation today.”

Now that only hastens the arrival of winter. The wise husband (if there is any), at this stage, contemplates course correction to bring on the second season of love. When yours truly did that, all roads seemed to lead homeward. So I tried things such as “I’ll make breakfast today” and went on to show what a fluffy tomato omelette I could make. Why that served to add fuel to the fire, I didn’t understand. The reason became clear when I glanced at the news report of a recent survey held in Britain: “The way to win a woman’s heart was not to show how smart one was but to run oneself down,” said the opening lines.

Wiser, one experimented with sincere self-deprecation for a week mouthing “What an insufferable wretch I am” at suitable intervals. But rather than melting the ice, such laments only drew frosty “Didn’t I know that!” looks. Was the survey faulty or had

I got it all wrong? To make sure, I retrieved the report from the pile of old newspapers and read it in its entirety this time. Its last paragraph said, “The technique [self-deprecation] should not be attempted by those who are already unpopular as it could make ‘low-status individuals’ appear ‘more pathetic’ than they did before.”